The present invention relates to data records, and more particularly to records reflecting various services afforded utilizing a network.
Network accounting involves the collection of various types of records while sending and receiving information over a network. Examples of such records may include, but are not limited to a session""s source, destination, user name, duration, time, date, type of server, volume of data transferred, etc. Armed with such accounting records, various services may be provided that require network usage metering of some sort.
Prior art FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating the various services 100 offered over a network such as the Internet. As shown, the various services include a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) session 102, an electronic mail session 104, and a voice over Internet Protocol (IP) session 106. The HTTP session 102 may include domain browsing, accessing an HTML page/frame, etc. The electronic mail session 104 may involve an SMTP transmitting server address and a POP3 receiving server address.
As shown, various levels of detailed information may be collected regarding numerous services afforded utilizing the Internet. Such information may be gathered with varied granularity depending on the accounting purpose at hand. For example, billing is currently handled based on a dial-up session which may include all of the above sessions. There may be situations where it is desired that billing be carried out as a function of domain browsing, an email session, etc. Such types of accounting are becoming increasingly important since permanent connections, i.e. DSL, Cable, GPRS, LAN, etc., are more and more prevalent, thus rendering billing based on a dial-up session obsolete.
With such opportunities to use such diversified records of Internet usage, a problem arises in collecting the same in an organized manner. Prior Art FIG. 2 illustrates prior art methods of organizing accounting information. As shown, a tailored single service data block 210 may be customized to account for specific services. For example, account, start time, duration, service, direction, quality-of-service (QoS), byte amount, number of e-mail, number of attachments identifiers or the like may be specifically accounted for in pre-allocated portions of the data block 210.
In yet another example, a generic single service data block 212 may be used to account for common information, i.e. an account identifier, start time, duration, service identifier, etc. Further, certain portions of the data block 212 may be allocated for attributes that may vary from service to service.
While these methods of accounting for network usage are somewhat effective, they fail to allow versatility to be introduced into the tracking process. In particular, as the amount of available tracking data increases, so does the complexity in handling such accounting information. An example of such complexity is exhibited when trying to organize services provided to a single customer.
There is therefore a need for a technique of rolling up service accounting information in a way which permits improved versatility and performance.